Submarines are sailing into World of Warships

David Hollingworth rigs for periscope depth and goes hands-on with a whole new way to battle.

World of Warships dev Wargaming is no stranger to tweaking and adding content to its popular military titles. Submarines, a wholly new, fourth class of vessel, have been announced, and the game will never be the same again. Wargaming’s already invested years into the new addition, with the first hint of this direction coming with last year’s Halloween event, where players took command of fantastic steampunk submersibles in a limited, strictly PvE event. The work that went into even that short test was immense, and the work’s not stopped since.

Submarines are going to be a whole new threat. Submarines operate at three preset depths: on the surface, at periscope depth, and fully submerged, and must balance an ever-dwindling oxygen resource that depletes ever faster the deeper they get. As always, getting the feel of the submarines right is a balancing act between accuracy, balance, and player expectation. The deeper a submarine is, the harder it is to spot, and at depth only destroyers have a chance of even coming close to finding them – which is another whole new system being added to the game. Historically, destroyers were often tasked as sub-hunters, armed with groundbreaking sonar technologies and a brutal array of depth charge ordnance.

This is modelled in the game by what the devs call a new ‘mini-game’. As destroyers are tooling around the map, large circles will appear on the water’s surface, denoting that there is a sub somewhere in that volume; the destroyer player will have a short amount of time to enter the circle, after which a second circle will appear not too far away, which the player must then get to again. This repeats three or four times, with each time the volume getting smaller and smaller, as the destroyer’s sonar effectively narrows down where the enemy sub is. When the destroyer reaches the final circle, it automatically launches depth charges.

Submarines are, of course, not without their own powerful attack. From periscope depth they can launch torpedoes much like any other ship – though only fore and sometimes aft but once your fish are in the water sub drivers can launch a special, nondamaging attack that Wargaming is calling an ‘acoustic wave’. It’s a little hand-wavey at the moment, and not entirely historically accurate; each acoustic wave hit (and you can hit targets both fore and aft for added effect) makes your torpedo attack more likely to hit, as the torps home in on the target. And let’s just say subs are not the toughest boats. Even a destroyer’s guns are a direct threat; a battleship’s broadside, if it finds you before you can dive, is going to give you a very short, sharp illustration in explosive dynamics.

This whole new aspect of the game is still a work in progress – and the trick is to integrate submarines into the game in a way that doesn’t so much change the way World of Warships plays, but to add a new and entirely organic element – one that feels like it belongs there. Full integration of sub-surface warfare is expected in 2020.

“As always, getting the feel of the submarines right is a balancing act between accuracy, balance, and player expectation. ”